Ideologies serve four main functions: explanation, evaluation, orientation, and prescription. They attempt to explain social conditions and events, evaluate them as good or bad, give people a sense of identity and place in society, and provide a program for political action. For example, Marxism explains wars as a result of capitalist competition, sees full employment as desirable, orients people as members of the working class, and prescribes the overthrow of capitalism. All ideologies aim to make sense of the world and motivate social or political change.

1. Functions of Ideology

2. • coherent and comprehensive set of ideas
• explains and evaluates social conditions,
• helps people understand their place in society,
• provides a program for social and political
action

3. Four Functions of Ideology
• Explanatory
• Evaluative
• Orientative and
• Programmatic functions

4. Explanation
• explanation of why social, political, and economic
conditions are
• search for some explanations
what is happening?
Why are there wars?
Why do depressions occur?
What causes unemployment?
Why are some people rich and others poor?
Why are relations between different races so often
strained and difficult?
• different ideologies supply different answers
• every ideology tries to answer & to make a sense
of the complicated world

5. • A Marxist-----war as an outgrowth of
capitalists' competition for foreign markets,
• fascist ------- tests of one nation's "will" against
another's
• A libertarian------ inflation as the result of
government interference in the marketplace,
• black liberationist-----trace the roots of most
social problems to white racism

6. • quite different-------but all ideologies offer a
way of looking at complex events and
conditions----- tries to make sense of them
• to reach as many people as possible,
• to offer simple explanations of puzzling events
and circumstances

7. Evaluation
• to supply standards for evaluation social conditions
• difference b/w explaining why certain things are
happening & deciding whether those things are good
or bad
• Are all wars evils to be avoided, or are some morally
justifiable?
• Are depressions a normal part of the business cycle or
a symptom of a sick economic system?
• Is full employment a reasonable ideal or a naïve pipe
dream?
• Are vast disparities of wealth between rich and poor
desirable or undesirable?
• Are racial tensions inevitable or are they avoidable?

8. • an ideology supplies the criteria
• Libertarian-------it increases or decreases the
role of government----
• if increases------undesirable
• Feminist------work for or against the interests
of the women
• Communist----- affects the working class
• it raises or lowers the prospects of its victory
in the class struggle

9. class struggle
• Communists--- as a good thing
• Fascists-----as an evil
all ideologies provide standards or cues to
decide policies and conditions are good, bad,
or indifferent

10. Orientation
• Supplies-------an orientation & a sense of identity
(who he or she belongs, and how he or she is
related to the rest of the world)
• people need ideology to find their social identity
and location
(to gain a sense of where they are, who they are,
and how they fit into a complicated world)

11. • Communist---- as a member of the working class
(freeing workers from capitalist exploitation and
oppression, & the ruling capitalist class
• Nazi----as a white person
(to preserving racial purity and enslaving or
even eliminating "inferior" races)
• Feminist-----as first and foremost a woman
(a movement aiming to end sexual oppression
and exploitation)

12. Political Program
• what to do and how to proceed
• a programmatic or prescriptive function
(doctors prescribe medicine & trainers provide
a program of exercise)
• prescribe remedies for sick societies and
treatments----to keep the healthy in good
health

13. • diagnosis for bad and growing worse
conditions-------- cannot supply effective
program---- lose support
• what ideologies try to do ?

14. • Communist------important to raise working class
(consciousness or awareness for the overthrow of
capitalism, the seizure of state power, and
creation of a cooperative, communist society
• Nazi-----important for the “superior” white race
(to isolate, separate, subordinate & exterminate-
Jews, blacks, and other ”interior” peoples)
• Libertarian----reducing or eliminating government
interference in people’s lives
• traditional conservatives------the state or govt to
intervene
(to promote morality or traditional values)

15. • Political ideologies---- link thought to action
• a vision of the social & political world
( as it is, & as it should be)
• to change or preserve their way of life
• If it doesn’t ----not a political ideology
• to sharpen our picture of what an ideology is